This chapter provides an overview of the Polish–Lithuanian Jews who were taken captive to be ransomed or sold into slavery. Once captured, these Jewish women and men found themselves trapped in two major international economic systems of the period. The first was the international trade in Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and Circassian captives carried out by the Crimean Tatars with the support of the Ottoman Empire. The second economic system was piracy in the Mediterranean. Two major issues are at the heart of the discussion on the fates of these Jewish captives. The first concerns the slave trade itself and how its market conditions shaped the fate of the captured Jews. The second deals with the effort to ransom the Jewish captives from eastern Europe and is focused on the transregional Jewish philanthropic networks that raised huge sums and transported them the long distances to the slave market, examining them in terms of both their form and their function.
The role of factoring in international trade financing
